1Q84 BOOK1〈4月‐6月〉前編

Note: The edition I read contained all of book 1, 前編 + 後編

The book alternates between the perspectives of two main characters: Aomame, who notices that the reality she is in differs just slightly from the one of her memories and Tengo, an aspiring writer who takes on a ghostwriting project.

If you're wondering whether this is a book you might enjoy you should absolutely be aware of one fact: It's slow. As in the whole of book 1? Feels like it's mostly setup for the later volumes. Add to that the fact that the two perspectives feel unrelated for the first half and that you could easily cut 1/3 of the words without losing anything and I think you might see why I feel the need to point this out. To be honest, if I were to rate just the 前編 I'd give it 2 or 3 stars depending on which chapter it ends on. That's not to say that absolutely nothing interesting happens in the first half (because there were certainly developments that I didn't see coming) but overall it felt like lots of setup with little pay-off. Luckily this gets better in the second half. At around the halfway point you begin to see the connections and are slowly getting glimpses of the big picture, which I found quite enjoyable.

There are some sex scenes (nothing really explicit) and I'm probably one of the worst people to rate them but they felt pretty boring and not particularly well written? On the bright sight you might learn some interesting vocab from them.

In terms of language learning the slow pace and repetition can be helpful. My version of the book only had furigana for less than half of the names, so that was somewhat annoying.